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Hands on from the back seat of Ford’s self-driving car: It really works

DEARBORN, MI — Riding along in
the back seat of Ford’s self-driving car is an uneventful experience.
The car steers itself along straight and curved roads, heeds stops signs
and traffic lights, yields to oncoming traffic when turning left, and
waits for pedestrians to cross the road. It waits longer for the road to
clear than virtually any driver you know, which may be part of its
ability to drive autonomously in 2016: Ford’s self-driving car is like
being driven by your overly cautious grandfather, but with better
reflexes.

Even this brief demonstration suggests Ford
and other automakers are not blowing smoke when they say they’ll have
truly self-driving cars within five years. One open area for improvement
by 2021 may be the ability to deal with the outlier exceptions, such as
a child chasing a ball into the street. In my brief test drive, a car
coming out of a side street and turning more or less into our path made
Ford’s test driver choose to take over control briefly.

Ten minutes to cover a 1.8-mile suburban loop

I rode in a Ford Fusion heavily modified, to say the least. Multiple Velodyne lidar
devices (above) sat on a roof bar. Long-range radars faced front and
rear, while short-range radars faced left and right (image below). The
car also had a long-range monochrome camera facing forward and a
shorter-range stereo color camera to track traffic signals and also
provide short-range distance information to supplement the radar. The
car retains the driver controls, and it’s crewed by a test driver behind
the wheel, ready to take over; a second engineer rides shotgun and
verifies all systems are working.

The loop we drove was 1.8 miles on and around
Ford’s suburban Dearborn campus. It took about 10 minutes. It has been
mapped in advance by 3D cameras to provide an accurate guide to the
roads, structures by the roadside, stop signs, crosswalks, concrete
medians, side streets, and driveways. Without this, confident self
driving wouldn’t be possible. The roads are so well-mapped that lane and
road-edge markings aren’t really necessary. This is the exact opposite
of what’s required for lane departure warning and lane centering assist
to work on today’s cars that are modestly self-driving — they can pace
the car in front via adaptive cruise control, stay centered in the lane,
and via blind spot detection warn of cars nearby when you’re about to
change lanes.

What the drive is like

Our car did a great job maintaining its
position on the road despite the lack of lane markings. I was surprised
how quickly it accelerated away from stop signs and traffic lights: no
burned rubber, but certainly a brisk acceleration. If the speed limit
said 25 mph, the car drove at exactly 25 mph. That suggests that on the
interstate, if you don’t have option “go with the traffic flow,” you’ll
be passed by most everyone on the road and occasionally flipped off by
drivers with places to be.

There were two other surprises: Our test car
was painfully slow in starting up again. Once a pedestrian clears the
crosswalk, the car waited for about 4 seconds before starting up. Ditto
for a stop sign where there’s no one around. That’s one algorithm I’d
tweak in a heartbeat. The car also anticipated a pedestrian who’s about
to step into the crosswalk and waited. It’s possible a lot of drivers
would figure they could be through the intersection long before the
pedestrian made his or her first step into the crosswalk.

The most complex maneuver was a left turn
against oncoming traffic. We got to the traffic light, a couple oncoming
cars turned left, and the road was clear for — it seemed to me — a
couple hundred yards ahead before the next oncoming car would reach the
intersection. Our car was programmed to wait, and wait, even though the
oncoming traffic took, by my thousand-one count, 8-9 seconds to reach
the intersection. That traffic cleared, and then we made the turn.
Obviously, Ford and others working on self-driving have a couple years
to fine-tune the car’s sense of adventure.

In making the left turn, we carved a slow,
precise arc. We stayed in lane, and didn’t come close to clipping the
lane markings in an effort to shave a few yards off the arc. On that,
the car is better than most human drivers. Once the wheels were
straight, the car accelerated briskly, just not enough to make up for
the lost time waiting for oncoming traffic.

A bit of a close call

Urban and suburban driving involves dealing
with others who misjudge timing, or cut in front of you, or do the
thousand other quirky things that are part of the driver’s experience.
In our case (video above), we were cruising at 25 mph and a car was
about to pull out of a side street on our left. The other driver should
have waited for us to go past. Instead, the driver pulled out and
started turning left into the lane to our left. (It was a
multi-lanes-each-way road.) The car chirped several times and the driver
in our car took over to ease us away from the possible incident. Our
car probably would have dealt with the problem autonomously, our driver
said, but better safe than sorry.

It can happen in five years

Based on this brief drive, it’s possible to believe Ford
and other companies have a shot at making cars be self-driving in five
years. It’s going to require smaller, cheaper sensors and ever-more
processing power to deal with the 3 million bits of data generated each
second as the car rolls along. All the roads must be precisely mapped.
One reason Uber is starting a self-driving project in Pittsburgh, not
multiple US cities, is that a self-driver needs all those streets to be
3D-mapped. Parking lots, too. Uber may have to decline Pittsburgh trips
that go outside the mapped geofences, or have the driver — there will be
one — take over once the car reaches the mapped limits.

Five years to a self-driving car may actually
mean 3-4 years until designs are locked in, and then another 1-2 years
of adaptation and fitting the pieces into the vehicles actually put on
sale to ride-share and ride-hailing companies. Regulators will want to
have their say, too. It’s a short time. It may be doable.

Hands on from the back seat of Ford’s self-driving car: It really works
Reviewed by G Geezgos
on
September 13, 2016
Rating: 5